valve cover cleaning breather chamber

[D.martijn]

I was questioning if someone ever tried removing the metal plate on the inside of the valve cover so you can clean inside of there?

I let my valve cover soak in a degreasing solution and removed most of the gunk from the inside, the stuff that was harder to get rid of I removed with some thinner.

When I wanted to clean the little chamber I poured thinner inside and sloshed the thinner back an forth but can't seem to remove all of it.

 

Has anyone removed the plate before? Do you just drill these out and then reinstall the plate with some new revits?

 

Thanks

 

['76mintgrün'02]

I have not removed that plate, but am wondering if you could remove the thinner using compressed air, or a heat gun?

 

Nice work on the underside of that cover.  Mine was blAck as well, so I cleaned it up.  It did not look that nice though : ) 

Tom

[D.martijn]

23 minutes ago, '76mintgrun'02 said:

I have not removed that plate, but am wondering if you could remove the thinner using compressed air, or a heat gun?

 

Nice work on the underside of that cover.  Mine was blAck as well, so I cleaned it up.  It did not look that nice though : ) 

Tom

 

I used an old rag to clean most of the dirty thinner, I than sprayed some brake cleaner on the cover and used compressed air.

Thanks! 

[Mike Self]

I've thought about removing that steel plate to clean up in that chamber, but had horrible thoughts about one of the fasteners that I used to reattach the plate coming loose and doing immeasurable damage somewhere else in the engine, so I've just cleaned it with spray carb cleaner and let it go.  Just thinking about a small stainless steel screw bouncing around inside my engine gives me the willies.

 

AFAIK the chamber is empty (no filter, screen etc inside).  It would take a lot of gunk to plug it up completely--and in 48 years of ownership with my '69 I've not had a problem with the chamber clogging.

 

mike

 

[Russell74Fjord]

and the breather is breathing out, not in, so any minimal gunk in there is going out. I also did this, and struggled a bit with cleaning that area, and did not mess with taking off that plate,